Keynote Session by Mr. Neeraj Sahai, President, Dun & Bradstreet International

Distinguished guests, I am delighted that you could join us today in this prestigious summit, which happens to be one of D&B's most esteemed gatherings in India. I know it's been a long day for you, and I would like to keep my remarks very short. For centuries, finance has fueled economic growth. D&B's history is closely tied to this sector, and we've been tied to the evolution of this industry. The need for trust in financial transactions led to the birth of credit reporting in the early 1800s, and it started with a group of English tailors who decided to share information about delinquent clients with one another. Recognizing the importance of reliable credit information, D&B's predecessor, the Mercantile Agency, was founded in 1841 to formalize the practice. So the Mercantile Agency was founded in 1841 to formalize the practice of credit reporting, and since then we've continued to provide formal credit reports, credit scores, credit performance to all of you and to our clients around the world. So we continue to serve you and the most important financial institutions and corporates around the world. As we reflect on the theme of this conference, of this summit, right, 'New Paradigm, New Approaches,' let us look at the key opportunities and challenges you face. And every opportunity is a challenge, and every challenge is an opportunity too. So what are some of them? Let's start with clients first, right? Client experience: how do you effectively and efficiently provide your customers the best experience through the entire buyer journey, from prospecting through onboarding through ongoing provision of services? Credit quality: how do you become and remain the most efficient processor of risk? Regulations: how do you efficiently and effectively comply with every rule and regulation in letter and in spirit? Competition: how do you effectively and speedily monitor competitive behavior and continually outperform them? Talent: how do you acquire and retain the best talent in the market in the most effective way possible? Now you would have noticed I've used the words 'efficient' and 'effective' repeatedly, and that's been deliberate, and I'll come back to that. You know, I've spent almost three decades in financial services and banking. I started my career in the mid-80s in Mumbai with Citibank. This is one of my favorite cities. And during that period of three decades, I've seen all the cycles in banking: the great cycles when things have gone superbly well, and the downsides from the sovereign debt crisis all the way through the last financial crisis when things have not been great for this industry. And during these 30 years, if you'd asked me what are your opportunities and challenges, I would have said the same thing I've said today: the five things I mentioned earlier. So what's different? What's different is the context. And let's talk a little about the context, right? And let's start with stakeholder expectations. What has happened? Clients have almost no tolerance for time latency and error, and decisions are expected in minutes. Regulators and boards of directors expect you to have perfect foresight and make no mistakes. Employees: when I was starting out my career, which is about 100 years ago, I was lucky that I got a job. Today, employees when I'm interviewing, they want to know not only about their job content, they want to know about their financials, that's basic. They want to know how the company is run, how does the company behave on an environmental basis, how does the company work on the DEI and affirmative action issues, they want to know about work-life balance, they want to know how many days do they work from home, how many days do they work in office. This is a fundamentally different context. Volume and speed of transactions: just to take an example, a bank that took 122 years to reach its first 2 million customers added 6 million in just 2 years. So the volume of what we are dealing with is just phenomenal, and the speed at which the complexity has substantially increased. Regulatory: the number of regulatory bodies, the number of regulations, the type of industries, the mix of clients, markets, financial instruments which move from simple loans to structured derivatives like triple barrier options. We are just dealing with far more variety of everything that we did in the past. And the competition also is not just from traditional banks, but it's from non-traditional institutions, what some people call the shadow banking sector, which really is not bound by the same rules or regulations and history that banks are tied by. So when you add this together, I would say at the end of the day one simple word describes it: complexity and speed. And that defines that the challenges you all face and you have to solve for, while similar, they are far more difficult in terms to solve. But at the same time, if you solve them right, they present great opportunities. And I remember I repeatedly mentioned 'efficiently' and 'effectively'. So with this complex environment, with heightened expectations, how do you efficiently and effectively deliver on them? And there are certain assets that today's world has. One is data: you have to make sure you have the most comprehensive, the most trusted, and the most dynamic data, both traditional and alternative. Data analytics: when you are dealing with such massive amounts of data, when I started as a credit analyst I would do a lot of the work myself, you know, starting to look at cash flow statements, P&Ls, balance sheet. Today, with the amount of information that's available, it's almost impossible for a human being to derive intelligence by itself. So deriving intelligence from this data by using the most sophisticated decision-making tools available, I think that's critical, because otherwise you can miss a signal. Generative AI: that's the way to deliver for the customer experience. Chatbots, you've seen, that's another way for solving for how customers interact with you. And digital workflows that seamlessly knit processes together. And I know you and your teams are working on deploying these rapidly. Leveraging these assets, please do remember that D&B is here to help you on your voyage, given our years of experience across markets, across geographies, across industries. And we obviously deploy a lot of these tools internally, we obviously help clients on their digital journeys and the use of artificial intelligence and the use of massive amounts of data in an efficient way. So again, we are here to partner with you on this journey. And I know the world's rapidly changing, whether it's an LLM, whether it's any of the chatbots, you know, you just heard about DeepSeek and how it does it, I'm sure many of you have used it. So as we navigate this rapidly moving financial landscape, it's imperative to recognize those leading the charge. Therefore, I extend my heartiest congratulations to the companies featured in the report 'Rethinking the Future of BFSI and Fintech' as well as the award winners across 19 categories. So thank you for your attention, thank you for being here, and I wish you all the very best on this journey ahead. Those who leverage these assets that I talked about efficiently are going to have a fascinating journey ahead of you, and those who fail to deploy them effectively, the world is not going to look that bright. So I wish you all the very best and thank you for your support and thank you for your business.